Spending Time on Social Media

With most everybody leading a busy lifestyle, almost everything we do is scheduled. We need to finish this and that at a certain amount of time. With so much that’s going on in our lives, we feel the need to map everything out to make sure everything is done within the waking day.

But when it comes to working on social media, have you asked yourself how much time do you need to work on it?

I say it’s easy to lose track of time when you’re caught up in social media. Personal users tend to find themselves stuck posting stuff or playing games on their favorite social media sites for hours on end. The same thing goes with business users. Checking up on a lot of things may take up a lot of time if you don’t know how to properly manage your time.

The thing is, you’re not really wasting time when you’re doing social media work for your business. Although you have to keep in mind that you also need to pay attention to other things in your life aside from your social media marketing strategy. This is why you need to learn to allot time for social media work and stick to it.

As Chris Brogan puts it, time management is important if you don’t want to get lost in your social media work. Set a certain amount of time for your strategy and stick to it. That way, you have time enough for other things that you need to do.

To make sure that you follow your allotted time, breaking down social media work is important. If you’ve decided you only want to do 3 hours of social media work every day, divide it accordingly to the 4 basic tasks in social media marketing.

Following the 3-hour work schedule, try alloting 1/4 each for listening and creating content. That’s about 45 minutes each for scoping out what others are saying about you and writing fresh content for your own followers.

Because social media revolves around communicating with other people, assign an hour and half to do you commenting and interaction. Use this time to visit other blogs and comment on posts you find relevant, as well as check comments posted on your blog entries and reply to them.

The reason why people lose track of time is because they get to caught up in the need to listen, comment, and reply to everything they see. The thing is, if you’re going to do that, I don’t think you’ll ever finish at all. Understand that you’re only human and that you can only do so much.

Also, keep in mind that in as much as your social media marketing efforts are important, that is not the only thing of value in your life. You have other things to do and you need to put time into those things, too.

Again, my example is just based on a 3-hour social media work schedule. You may want to allot more time or less, it’s up to you. Just make sure that you break down the things you need to do, schedule them, and stick to that schedule. Not only will you be able to cover all bases of your social media marketing strategy better, but you’ll also get other things done after.

What about you? How long do you spend on your social media marketing work each day?